The present invention relates to preparation of frozen confectionery products and to preparation of the products by extrusion and to preparation of products which include two material components wherein one component provides a pattern in another component which is, particularly, an aerated ice confectionery material.
Consumers have been offered articles of ice confectionery with new textures such as cakes or individual moulded portions such as cups or cones and the like containing inclusions of material of texture which is different from that of the body of aerated ice confection, e.g. crispy fat-based material.
In European Patent Application Publication No. 0 221 757, an ice cream cone containing chocolate in the form of a plurality of flakes is produced by injecting chocolate into an extruded strand of ice cream provided with longitudinal grooves to form longitudinal thin strip-like chocolate layers in said ice cream strand, and the chocolate layers which solidify on contact with the ice cream break randomly into flakes when the strand is folded double to fill the cone wafer.
According to U.S. Pat. No. 5,135,767, to make a cup or cone having a flaky texture, superposed ribbons of ice cream and chocolate are extruded into a mold in the form of spirals by means of an extrusion assembly which comprises a flat extrusion tube and a spray tube and which receives a spinning movement resulting from an eccentric rotational movement and an ascending movement relative to the mold.
In U.S. Pat. No. 5,283,070, a layered cone is made by extruding an aerated ice cream into a vertically descending helix rotating about a vertical axis and having spaced flights which define passages between the helix, spraying chocolate into passages of the extruded helix and depositing the sprayed helix in a cone so that a layered product having alternating layers of ice cream and chocolate is formed.
In U.S. Pat. No. 4,542,028, composite ice confection cakes comprising a multiplicity of superimposed successive thin layers of ice cream separated by interleaved very thin chocolate layers are made by successively extruding ice cream ribbons through slotted extrusion outlets on a conveyor, spraying thin chocolate layers on the ice cream ribbons and cutting portions transversally to the multilayered strand.
In the prior art, layered confectionery products made by extrusion have thus been produced either by forming alternate layers of ice cream and chocolate within a mold which gives its shape to the article or by sequentially depositing thin ribbon-like ice cream layers and spraying chocolate between the layers on a conveyor and cutting the thus formed multiple layer strand with a vertical blade cutter through the product transversally to the inclusion layers, which gives limited shapes.
The known methods do not provide layered articles such as stick-bar and the like.